The Cilla Rose Affair (24 page)

And then he stopped.

He examined the inside of his arm, the small red puncture mark, and the corresponding lump embedded in skin and muscle an inch below his elbow. And he was seized with a sudden, blatant horror.

He’d been told about the ricin, about Markov and Kostov and Exhibit A down at Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, about pellets the size of pinheads and fractional deposits of refined poison, enough to kill an average-sized man in a matter of days.

He touched the lump with his fingertip, gently, taking care not to disturb it, battling a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He put the back of his hand against his forehead; it was hot. He was hot, and he felt like he was getting the flu.

He looked at his watch, and discovered he had been unconscious since nine o’clock.

Desperately, he forced himself to his feet. There was a staircase behind him, a brick-lined vertical cylinder. The way out, up to the surface. It had to be. Steadfastly, hanging onto the brass handrail, Robin began to climb.

It was a long way to the top. Fifty feet. Sixty. He stopped to rest, to get his breath, and then pushed forward again. He could see the end of his journey, crumbling concrete, rotting wood.

There was the door, and beyond the door—the world. The sound of traffic on the road, horns beeping, squealing brakes.

But the door was immovable. Padlocked from the outside. There was no knob on this side. And he had no tools with which to remove hinge-pins.

Defeated, Robin sank down.

He could sit here all night. Pound on the door. Hope to be rescued.

Die waiting.

Or he could help himself. Now.

He went downstairs again, slowly, clinging to the handrail.

At the bottom, he stepped over blackened brick rubble and corrugated tin. Negotiating his way around shored-up walls, splintering timbers and torn posters, he came upon a room, its door missing—storage, Robin thought, station operations. Inside he found an old wooden desk, one of its drawers home to an ink-blotted timetable from 1941, detailing first and last train times and all of the frequencies in between.

Other drawers contained magazines:
Playboy
,
Tit-Bits
, a well-thumbed
Penthouse
from 1987 and another from last month, unexpected testimony to more recent occupations.

There was a vintage broom in the corner, and on a shelf beside it the accoutrements of a modern janitor: a galvanized bucket, a mop, several filthy rags, a cardboard box of scouring powder.

On a hook on the wall hung a nondescript grey jacket, heavy with dust. Robin ran his hands through its pockets, quickly, searching. Two old pence. He put them in his own pocket, longshot luck. One elastic band. One box of wooden matches, ten left.

Behind the empty bucket, he discovered an old-fashioned signal lamp, glass and brass and a reservoir for oil, long-emptied.

Robin tore the room apart.

He found it in the farthest corner: a metal container with a screwed-on lid. He gave it a shake, then undid the lid, and sniffed.

Kerosene.

Dragging the chair away from the desk, he sat down. He opened the little door of the lantern, mangling its hinges, yanking it off its frame. With calculated precision, he tapped the glass on the corner of the desk, once, twice, there—the pane cracked. Carefully, he removed the shards and placed them on the desktop.

He poured the kerosene into the lamp’s reservoir, and soaked the wick, and sacrificed the first match from the janitor’s jacket pocket. He held one of the shards of glass in the flame, sterilizing all of its cutting edges. He reached back and found the little pile of rags, and unfolded and refolded them again, and stacked them up beside his elbow in order of relative cleanliness, the least dirty on the top. Given the choices he was facing, he preferred to take his chances with blood poisoning.

He waited for a few more precious moments, closing his eyes, rehearsing in his mind what he was going to do. He planted his right arm firmly on the end of the desk, gasping its edge in his fist. He sited the hard, raised lump beneath the skin of his inner forearm, and positioned the sharp point of the glass at the tiny red dot marking the original point of entry. He cut swiftly, slicing through his skin in a single stroke.

Quickly, he tossed his improvised scalpel aside and seized a rag and attempted to blot away the rivulet of blood that had welled up in the wound and trickled down his arm to the desktop. He felt for the lump. Still there.

He pressed down with his fingernail, and the silver ball popped out of the cut like a miniature buoy bobbing to the surface of a red lake. With shaking fingers, he picked it out. He made a pad out of the rag and pressed it down over the cut, hard, stemming the river of blood. He secured it with a second rag, tightening the knot with his teeth.

And it wasn’t until then that he allowed himself to wipe away the tears that had soaked his lashes and trickled down the crease of his nose, to his mouth. They tasted salty.

He sniffed, and took two deep breaths, and waited in the dim light, his arm throbbing and burning, for his heart to stop pounding in his chest.

There was a commonality to old tube stations. The summer they’d come over to stay with their Gran, Ant had explained it to him, Robin listening with fraternal patience.

There was a pattern in the way they’d been excavated and built, before the introduction of escalators, when lifts had been used to convey passengers to and from the surface.

The booking hall was on the street. You went in, you bought your ticket, and you went down. The lift deposited you on the first landing, and then you had to negotiate a passage over one set of tracks, sometimes both of them, depending on the direction you were going in and where the platforms had been situated.

If, for some reason, the lifts were out of service, you could take the stairs down from the surface and then cross over the tracks to the trains. This was where he now stood, in the short, dark bridge that led away from the first landing. There were trains rumbling beneath him. Robin could feel the rush of their wind through an archway of meshwork rising from the floor to his knees—wire caging that had been clogged and blackened by decades of Underground grime.

The passageway came to an abrupt end; a short staircase led down to his left. Tentatively, Robin descended. At the bottom, there ought to have been access to the two platforms, but he could see by the flickering light of his signal lamp that both openings, left and right, had been completely sealed with bricks.

He sat down on the bottom step to think.

Then he got up, and trudged back through the passage, to the cavern where he’d begun his journey.

There was a second commonality to all tube stations, and that was that in 99% of all cases, there was another way in and out. For each tunnel marked TO THE TRAINS, there existed an identical twin on the other side of the station. It was the stuff and substance of traffic flow, and all Robin had to do was find it.

He walked back to the stairshaft, which was located next to the station’s two original lift shafts.

That way to the trains, he reasoned, following his intuition around to the other side of the staircase—this way out.

There it was: the parallel universe, dark and smelling of must and decay.

He raised the lamp and saw, in the flickering flame, stacked up against and along the wall, a number of small wooden crates—about a dozen in all, he judged, stamped with serial numbers and stencilled red-paint letters, none of which yielded any sort of clue as to the boxes’ contents.

Interesting, Robin thought, investigating one or two of the crates to see if he could pry their tops loose and see what was inside.

No such luck.

And it was time he was going.

Turning away from the wall, his light caught the entrance to the tunnel, and a sign warning wrong-way passengers of their mistake:

NO EXIT

He crept to the end of the enclosed bridge. There, instead of steps leading down to the left, he discovered stairs going right.

And at the bottom of the stairs…an opening.

Robin stood at what had once been the platform entrance, the gale from the trains snatching at his hair, billowing his shirt. It was difficult to see but in front of him he thought he could just make out a narrow catwalk made of boards and struts, with no guard rail, and some crude steps at one end providing a way down to the trackbed for maintenance workers.

Carefully, he tested the staging. It was old. Its ancient boards creaked with his sudden weight. He dropped to his hands and knees, and crawled along its length, pushing the flickering oil lamp in front of him. He considered going all the way to the end, and lowering himself to the tracks, then thought the better of it and sat with his back to the wall instead, the lamp beside him.

It was nearly midnight, and he knew London went to bed early. The last train would come soon, and then it would be safe.

He leaned his head back, and ran his eyes over the curved wall opposite, blackened with the grime of ages. He turned his head to the right, and realized that where he was sitting corresponded very roughly to where the old concrete platform would have been. The wall behind his head still glimmered with the glazed ceramic tile of its original fittings.

He leaned forward, and raised the lamp, following the gleam along until he came across the roundel, the red circle with the blue bar crossing through it. And through the sooty black streaks, he could just make out the name of the station.

ROMILLY SQUARE

Romilly Square.

He should have guessed.

An hour later, checking his watch, Robin glanced down the tracks, apprehensively. To his immediate left loomed the gaping black mouth of the running tunnel, lit by the cool green glow of an electric signal, a few yards in.

The tunnel was about 12 feet wide, with the trains designed to fit inside it like pistons. That was what caused the gales to blast through the stations when a train was approaching. There wasn’t as much wind on the newer Victoria Line, Robin remembered, because Ant had told him when they’d dug out the Victoria Line in the late 1960s, they’d designed the tunnels to be a few inches wider, to cut down on air drag and thus, current consumption.

This was not the Victoria Line, however. And where, on the Victoria Line, there might have been just enough room along the side of the tunnel for a person to squeeze himself as a train flew past—here, on the Northern Line, midway between Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road, Robin judged that to be a very dicey proposition indeed.

The merest whisper of a breeze brushed past his face.

Far down the other end of the station, in the tunnel, Robin could see headlights, two tiny pinpoints of yellow reflecting on the tracks. The pinpoints grew, steadily, until they exploded into a pair of bright, dazzling spots. The train rushed towards him, hurling before it a hurricane of warm air. Robin could see its number, illuminated above the round lights—006—and above the driver’s door, dead centre, the destination blind:

KENNINGTON

via Charing X

The train roared past, rattling the unsteady platform in a thunder of flickering yellow lights, blue sparks and silver livery.

It was gone.

Robin watched its red tail lights as they were swallowed in the black hole of the opposite tunnel.

That, absolutely, had to be the last train.

Carefully, taking the lantern, he made his way down the rickety steps, to the trackbed. With some trepidation, he made note of the configuration of the four rails, two of which were electrified, the other two not. It was 25 minutes after one.

Taking a deep breath, he entered the tunnel.

He walked for ten minutes, clinging to the iron ribs of the tunnel, alone in the black silence with his glimmering lamp and a raging fever and a heart that was out to beat the 3 minute mile.

It was very difficult to keep his balance. The pathway was narrow, the round tunnel wall disorienting, the lay of the land uneven. As he’d left the station, the tracks had fallen away, abruptly, dropping down and down, and then they’d curved, and banked.

He stopped, and rested his arm against one of the great girders, the grit gathering under his fingernails and caking his hands. He leaned his head against his arm.

What was that?

He raised his head. A whisper. He’d felt it: barely a breath, warm, stirring.

No
.

The flame in his lantern danced and bobbed, throwing the shadows askew on the walls.

Couldn’t be.
Couldn’t be
.

Heart pounding, he listened.

And he heard it: the tracks, the tiny zing of wheels against steel.

Oh God
.

He looked around him, desperately. Run? Where?
How
?

Swallowing, he tried to wedge himself into a hollow created by two of the bolted iron ribs. He willed himself smaller, narrower, his legs shorter, his shoulders compacting like a cat’s. He felt the wind pick up, was afraid to grasp the cables over his head, not knowing what was in them.

Deep in the tunnel behind him was a sound, a low moan, like the wind in prairie telephone wires. He could feel the train’s hot breath blasting his face, pushing forward, piston-driven. Suddenly, brilliantly, there it was—lights first, rounding the curve, coming, coming—

Robin shut his eyes and squeezed his hands together between his knees—
please—please—please—

Rocking and rolling, the great silver train hurtled past. He could feel the machinery of its wheels nipping at his knees, dirt and grit and grease spitting at his jeans and his shirt. He could feel the draft sweeping past, pulling him out of the wall—

Gone.

He opened his eyes as the last of the travelling glow from the tail lights disappeared around the curve. He waited for a few moments in the utter darkness, the oil lamp still safe between his feet, its flame extinguished. Then he pushed himself out of his shelter, standing up straight. He reached out with his hand and touched the wall, comforting and solid. He found the pathway with his foot, then ballast, then a rail. He drew back, quickly.